Bethesda Says Dawnguard “Not Announced” For PC

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That’s not to say that it’s not coming out, just that there’s no announcement, and that we should therefore not expect its imminent release – which was something we wondered about with the advent of the recent patch. Pete Hines, who tweeted the news of the non-announcement, followed up by saying “I was simply stating that expecting/demanding something today is unfounded. Not that news is never coming.” SO MAYBE IT WILL BE ANNOUNCED. IT’S ANYONE’S GUESS.

Oh well, anyway, that’s a shame. We’d just imagined it had been announced. I’m going to pass the time waiting for announcement by installing one bajillion mods from Skyrim’s Steam Workshop and seeing what happens. Crabs wearing monocles, probably.

It could be because the Dawnguard DLC has to be converted to the quality of the HD texture pack they released, as well as the original lower resolution textures of vanilla Skyrim for those who won’t download the pack.

I know the HD pack wasn’t exactly jaw-droppingly higher resolution, but in the interests of compatibility with all use-cases, a “done when it’s done” delay is understandable.

As long as it appears before Christmas, and my year long “wait for the GOTY in December 2012 after all the patches and mods have been sprayed for bugs and buy it at a discount like a Fox!” plan isn’t disturbed by its absence, I can’t find a compelling reason to get upset.

Since they released the HD pack for PC only and only after the vanilla game assets were distributed to all platforms already, a delay (for this contextual reason) would be inevitable anyway since it can be assumed the team has to finish Dawnguard vanilla before it can spare the man-hours to beautify it to Dawnguard HD.

All just theories and speculation of course. Jingle bells, jingle bells…~

I don’t think it’s a matter of beautifying it for the PC release, but a matter of uglifying it for the consoles: surely they start by working with HD textures and then reduce the resolution of them, rather than the other way around?

Thats just not true,
as said, its not the way people work no matter if its consoles , pc , phones

A possible example: You are a photographer and have a good camera, you dont take a photo with the lowest resolution because its gonna be for a cheap small newspaper, you take your photo as good as possible save it raw then adapt it after
videogame creation is the same

the problem here is more about implementing the assets but everything is definitely there already

@f1x: Actually, it is true. There are multiple titles that show it has been true on multiple occasions – the quickest to come to mind is Crysis 2. With a console focus, the PC version released without high resolution textures. If they had been available on release, they would have been included in the game. Instead, they weren’t released for around another 3 months A correlation to photography isn’t valid. We’re not talking about photography. You have to remember that there’s more to a game’s texture than simply a repeating pattern. It’s also worth keeping in mind that implementing textures, once they’re ready to be added to the game, is usually a rather straight-forward process. At the simplest, you’re replacing one set of textures in the database with another set of textures with the same name.

You might be right, photography analogy perhaps is not the best one, but as we are talking about textures, they are images aswell, its pointless to start from a low resolution asset cause when you need to go bigger you have to CREATE the textures again as you cannot scale from a low resolution file into a high resolution one

but yes, considering the state of triple AAA game development and the delivery dates I can see that happening, then I must go back to my point, working with less than the biggest quality possible regarding textures means working without professionality,

TES games have typically had two expansions, so you’ll be lucky to get a PC GOTY version before Christmas. (Or if you do, it won’t be the “complete” edition — cf. Civ V’s GOTY edition which lacks some of the DLC)

eh?
Arena and Daggerfall had no expansions.
Morrowind had two.
Oblivion had one real expansion (Shivering Isles), a mini expansion (Knights of the Nine) and some DLC (including of course the Horse Armour DLC).

Fallout 3 had 5 DLC’s (each one substantial, I’d say bigger than Kinights of the Nine), and Fallout: New Vegas (made by Obsidian, but published by Bethesda, who probably had a big say in the amount of DLC) had 4 big DLC’s.

It’s anyone’s guess what the number of expansions/DLC will be for this one.

I was thinking only of the two named *expansions* (as opposed to micro-DLC like the Orrery) which Morrowind and Oblivion both had. While F3 had far more, Beth have already indicated that they’re going for fewer-but-bigger-expansions with Skyrim. Would be very surprising if there wasn’t another which at least approached the scale of Dawnguard.

While true and possible (this is to you too jha4ceb), it is reasonable to doubt they would postpone a guaranteed influx of profit with a GOTY more than a year after release. GOTYs more than 12-13 months after a release aren’t really seen in the first place.

In a recession, one can always count on industries throwing everything onto the market for Christmas if it can be helped. Everybody wants that quarterly numbers bump for their balance sheets.

Or maybe I’m wrong? Does anyone remember how long after launch Fallout 3 was GOTY’d? Could’ve sworn it was in time for Christmas.

I don’t know. Competent designers work with high res assets and dumb them down if needed (like it is necessary for the boxy thingy) in order to do not have to do two times the same work.
There may be some work to incorporate them in the PC version, especially QA but I don’t see how it can take so much time.

Anyway, I have to admit that I find Skyrim very overrated : The writing is pretty bad imho. And I you have played to another Elder Scrolls game, the lore is not exactly original either.
I don’t regret the time I have spent on that game but I am not looking forward to re installing it for an add-on.

Actually, I have found that although I loved Skyrim initially, the more I play it the more it falls apart and I resent it for what it could have been.

I haven’t even touched the main storyline yet but as he says – by and large the writing is pretty terrible and the deeper into questlines I get, the lazier it feels. The initial missions for the thieves guild, for example, felt fairly interesting, involved me in the world etc. At that stage i loved the game. But VERY quickly the storyline became a mess of confused cliches and nonsensicle motivations, pointless monolgues, blatant exposition and completely unrelated tasks. My meteoric rise to head of the thieves guild occurred in a matter of in-game hours and involved almost no theft.

On top of that, the skyrim world was touted to be a complex and interrelated world, down to a simulated economy that would be subtly altered by your actions as a player (such as harvesting a particular area of a resource would reduce the resources of that area and so impact their economy. I seeeeem to recall there being talk of regions within the game interacting with each other and affecting each other’s economies and that destroying a village for example, would dramatically affect the economy of the entire game. Instead, none of that exists and I find that I am able to become the head honcho of pretty much every organisation in the game, despite open hostilities between some factions and a lack of ANY applicable skill sets. And then, assuming such powerful positions makes no tangible difference to my experience at all. I have already had kings grovel at my feet for help, despite being a no-body escaped prisoner and so being the apparent ruler every element of skyrim’s society seems entirely pointless.

I don’t know if that’s necessarily wrong. Initially it was easy for me to really get into the Skyrim ‘magic’, the suspension of disbelief if you will. Before I knew, I’d played a good 80 hours or so over a few weeks and had a great time. But then, from one moment to the next, it just fell flat as I reached the end of the scripted content. The open world I was then exposed to, without direction, just seemed very shallow and pointless. There’ll always be wolves, bears, giants, faction-less NPCs that are always hostile and always will be.

Anyway, there aren’t many games that last me 80 hours, so I’m more than satisfied with my Skyrim purchase. I just don’t think it’s a great sandbox game.

I think this is just a sign that Announcing has become a very formal and serious event for the AAA studios. Hopefully we’ll eventually end up with notes in The Times.
“Mr Windows PC and Miss Dawnguard of Skyrim wish to announce their porting.”

After playing Skyrim constantly like everyone else i couldnt wait for the DLC it was a real kick in the teeth to wait 30 days whilst X-box owners played the new content + posted walkthroughs and you tube videos. Now we are told there is no date + i really can’t be bothered, its the summer holidays and i am left without my favorite game – am i going to keep waiting or am i just going to play something else – what do you think!!!
I cant imagine this works as a profit making strategy all it does it alienate the majority of your customers.

I think they’ve made themselves a difficult bed to lie in, having two sets of textures to create for every new release (if the HD/Vanilla split is the actual reason for this non-announcement announcement).

When it was first announced that DLC would be Xbox-exclusive for 30 days, I didn’t pay it much attention… I just wanted Skyrim. Now it just annoys me.

Taking a bribe to treat your existing customers differently seems… insulting? I don’t know. In any case, I haven’t felt the need to play Skyrim for several months, so I’ve decided not to reward Bethesda’s greed — I’m just not going to bother with Dawnguard, or any other timed-exclusive garbage they pump out. Judging from what others are saying, it’s a buggy mess anyway.

Bringing the thing to PC is easy and people will buy it, so of course it’s coming. Maybe they’re sorting out some issues that came up, there were some issues with the localized versions of Dawnguard on 360.

Yeah no, they developed this in HD textures for PC to begin with. They are not releasing it because of an exclusivity deal. If they are going to treat me like a second class consumer, they will not have my money, simple as that.

To be honest, I do not even care anymore.
From what I read this DLC is rather mediocre.
And I have been playing other games for a long time now.
I have put 150 hours into Skyrim and that is enough for a while.
I will probably wait until there is a Steam sale for all the DLC.
Although… once Borderlands 2, Farcry 3, GTA V etc. are released all bets are off. I might never go back to Skyrim. I only live once.

Meh, Bethesda get way too many free passes, it’s about time something happened to make people a bit mad at them, maybe then people will start getting mad about them constantly releasing the most buggy games I’ve ever played.

On the other hand, several comments here have noted that the expansion on consoles is buggy; wouldn’t taking the time to polish up the PC release be exactly what we wanted, for them to show that they care about the platform?

Bethesda..I am disappointed. I’m not anxious to buy this dlc, but I did plan to. They’re going to run into other major releases if they wait.

As far as I can tell the pc gamer base IS substantial, does still actively play the game, and definitely is still making mods for skyrim. This gives it a value the console game doesn’t have, and I’d think they’d want to treat people who are still actually playing their game a little bit better…

I like you guys, and I like your RPG’s. You’ve provided some of my favorite gaming experiences of the last decade, and I appreciate that. Please, then, don’t leave PC gamers out in the cold (haha) on Skyrim content. That kind of breach of trust would be difficult to recover from, and will cost you sales long into the future.